4 Comments

It seems that the Nova approach and Ben Carson’s approach can be married.

Nova only requires 3 1/2 hours of school. Why not add a book a week from a reading list for all that other time they have. I bet it would increase to more than a book a week fairly quickly.

Expand full comment
author

Interesting thought. Graft a book reading group onto the Studia Nova program. This idea has merit.

Expand full comment

This censorship situation is appalling really.

What search engines do you use?

I was looking for a specific law (1986 vaccine) and couldn’t find the text on the congressional website and complained to my daughter. She then looked and eventually found the text. hilariously She said that’s cause you didn’t use use google. I have to use different engines depending on my search.

Expand full comment
author

Yes, I know situations where Google actively biases search to make it impossible to find what you are looking for. The issue with this interview, however, is different. It has to do with the domain authority of a site and how Google insists on "coherent semantic content," so that if the site is sending too many diverse signals about too many things that Google can't conveniently place under some rubric, the site loses domain authority and its pages don't rise up in the search engines. Content sites like the one where the interview originally appeared are condemned to play an SEO game, and playing that game often means removing content that the search engines are penalizing (like amputating a gangrenous finger). Going to another search engine is irrelevant here because Google has such huge market share, so sites in business to make money need to keep Google happy (it doesn't matter if a search engine like duckduckgo values the content, because it controls hardly any of the overall search traffic, and SEO-based sites depend on that overall traffic).

Expand full comment